Serial Killers

November 22, 2010 Updated Jan 8, 2013

Rodney Alcala

A registered sex-offender, Rodney Alcala got his 15-minutes of fame as a successful contestant on "The Dating Game" in 1978.  Before that appearance, he had already been convicted of raping an 8-year-old girl and had murdered four women. He would go on to murder a 13-year-old girl.

Update: On death row at San Quentin since 1979, Rodney Alcala, now 69, was sentenced in New York Supreme Court on January 7, 2012 to two concurrent 25 years to life in prison sentences for raping and murdering two women in New York in the 1970s. In 1971, Cornelia M. Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, was raped and strangled in her Upper East Side apartment. Seven years later, the body of Ellen Jane Hover, 23, an aspiring orchestra conductor, was found at the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County. Alcala pled guilty to the two murders on December 14. He will now be returned to death row at San Quentin. Since 2006, there has been a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal-injection controversy.

By Denise Noe

Bachelor Number One

Airing in the 1960s and 1970s, “The Dating Game” was a popular show about singles finding romance. Usually, a young woman would be on one side of a partition asking a series of quirky and often sexually suggestive questions of a trio of bachelors on the other side of it. Without seeing them, and not being allowed to ask their names, occupations, ages, or incomes, she would think over their answers during a commercial break and then select one of the three for a date.

Occasionally, the roles were reversed and a man would do the selecting from a group of three “bachelorettes.” The show did not use the term “spinsters” for its unmarried female guests probably because that word, so strongly associated with starched gingham and hair-in-a-bun prudishness, would have been out of place in the time period.

“The Dating Game” was hosted by Jim Lange who began every episode by stepping through a flower-speckled partition that suggested the “flower power” that would become a cliché in that hippie era.

In 1978, a program aired in which Lange introduced “Bachelor Number One” as “a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13 – fully developed.”  Lange paused while the audience laughed appreciatively at the double entendre. Then the host continued, “Between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling. Please welcome Rodney Alcala.”

The audience saw Bachelor Number One, a handsome, dark-haired young man with a ready smile.

Nov. 1, 2010

Johann "Jack" Unterweger

With the help of future Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek and other prominent Austrian literati, Jack Unterweger wrote his way out of a lifetime sentence for murder. Paroled in 1990, and now a famous crime writer himself, he embarked on a wide-ranging killing spree, murdering women in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Los Angeles. 

by Mark Pulham

Vienna. People sitting in cafés eating Sachertorte, listening to the music of Mozart and Strauss, walking through the Vienna Woods, and if you are a film buff, thinking about The Third Man. Vienna is synonymous with culture. It is not the first place anyone thinks of when you mention serial killers. Yet in the spring of 1991, particularly in the red-light district, the fear of a killer on the loose gripped the city.

It began on April 8, 1991, when a young prostitute named Silvia Zagler vanished. When last seen, she had been standing on her regular corner around 10:30 p.m. Sabine Moitzi worked in a bakery during the day. At night, unknown to her husband, she occasionally boosted her income by working as a “secret prostitute,” which meant that she was not, as is required by the laws of Vienna, registered with the Office of Health. Eight days after Zagler’s disappearance, Sabine’s friend, Ilse, dropped the 25-year-old woman off near the rail yard of the West Train Station. A short while later, she disappeared.

Sept. 23, 2010

William Hare and William Burke

William Burke and William Hare are the most famous grave robbers of 19^th century Scotland, but none of the 16 fresh corpses they turned over for dissection in the anatomy classroom of Dr. Robert Knox at 10 Surgeon Square in Edinburg, came from any graveyard.  

by Mark Pulham

Up the close and down the stair,
In the house with Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief
Knox, the man who buys the beef. 

Children's rhyme

It is dark, and the only sound is that of someone digging. As quietly as they can, the grave robbers remove the earth from the newly interred and remove the lid of the coffin. Fearful of capture, they remove the corpse and hurriedly get away before someone discovers them. It is a profitable and fast growing business. And the most famous body grave robbers of all are Burke and Hare. In films and stories, they are shown committing this dreadful act. But the films and stories got it wrong, Burke and Hare never dug up a body.  No, they were far worse.

In Britain, the Murder Act of 1752 made it illegal for any doctor to perform a dissection on a corpse, unless the corpse was that of an executed criminal. In the 1700’s, any number of crimes could result in the death penalty. Even petty crimes such as cutting down trees, pick pocketing more than a shilling, stealing a horse or a sheep (hence the phrase, “may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb”) or being out at night with a blackened face could result in an execution.  As a result, there were hundreds of corpses available each year.

By the 1800’s, as the number of medical students began to grow, the demand for cadavers increased, but by now laws allowing more lenient punishments were on the books and the number of criminals executed had fallen to as low as 50 to 60 a year.

As always, with demand outstripping supply, someone would provide the bodies. Anatomists would turn a blind eye when the resurrection men came around with a recently interred corpse. Body snatching became a lucrative business and was so common that many graveyards built high walls and railings around them and erected watchtowers.

Sept. 23, 2010

An excerpt from the opening chapters of Marilyn Z. Tomlins’s Die in Paris, published in the United States in September of 2010 by Raider Publishing International. The book is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and borders.com.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

In the early evening of Saturday, March 11, 1944, the telephone rang on the desk of the duty officer at the Porte Maillot police station house. Until that moment, Rue le Sueur in Paris’ elegant sixteenth arrondissement had made it into the news just once. That was in April 1912. That month, the French singer and actress, Léontine Pauline Aubart, from Number 17, had set sail from Southampton for New York with her lover, Benjamin Guggenheim, but she had returned to Rue le Sueur, alone and grieving. The ship she and her Ben had boarded in Southampton for the Atlantic crossing was the Titanic. Guggenheim had gone down with the ship.

Rue le Sueur would yet again be in the news.

On the phone was Jacques Marçais, a retired clerk. Jacques and Andrée, his wife, lived in an apartment at Number 22 Rue le Sueur. He was calling to report that for the past six days pestilential smoke has been pouring from the chimney of a townhouse across the street.

The duty officer did not understand why someone would think that a smoking chimney needed investigating. In 1938, world war had broken out and France had capitulated to the enemy – Nazi Germany – and, since June 1940, when the Germans had occupied northern France, which included Paris, they’d been imposing frequent power cuts on the Parisians.  It might have been spring, but it was still cold in Paris, and the Parisians had to light fires for heat. Consequently, in just about every Paris living room, a fire was roaring, and, from every Paris chimney, poured smoke.

Jacques explained. It was the chimney of an uninhabited house, and that was certainly not normal. The duty officer promised to send a patrolman over as soon as possible.

June 20, 2010 

Jeffery Dahmer

by Laura Schultz, MFT

“You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body.  You’re looking into their eyes. A person in this situation is God. Sometimes I feel like a vampire and I like to kill. I’m the most cold-blooded sonofabitch you will ever meet. We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. AND there will be more of your children dead tomorrow. I wouldn’t trade the person I am or what I’ve done for anything. So I don’t think about it. And at times it’s a rather mellow trip to lay back and remember”.

---Ted Bundy

“I love to kill people. I love watching them die. I’d shoot them in the head and they would wiggle and squirm all over the place and just stop. Or I’d cut them with a knife and watch their faces turn real white.  I love all that blood.”

---Richard Ramirez, aka The Night Stalker

“I am a monster. I am the ‘Son of Sam’. I am programmed to kill. I love to hunt, prowling the streets looking for fair game – tasty meat.  I live for the hunt—my life. Sam is a thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood”.

---excerpt from letters of David Burkowitz, aka “Son of Sam”          

Each of these killers “hunted” by night in the shroud of darkness as a deer hunter might stalk his prey. One can only imagine the horror and agony each of the human victims experienced as they were being bound, beaten, choked, raped, shot and/or tortured. For some, death was a release that ended the unspeakable horror, the utter horror of it all. Others scratched, screamed and fought back with all their strength until the inevitable last gasp. But very few escaped with their lives. Those who did live to testify and talk about what they had endured, constantly replayed the tape of the lurid details in their minds for years to come. Never again could they return to the life they had known before being captured in the clutches of their worst nightmare – a human killing machine.

November 5, 2003

Richard Ramirez

Richard Ramirez was a spineless, gutless punk who terrorized Los Angeles for five months in 1985. His frenzied nighttime murder spree of random targets was as senseless and pointless as his life.

by David Lohr

Richard Ramirez's random and inexplicable murder spree began on June 28, 1984, in Glassel Park, Calif., a small suburban community in Los Angeles. He parked his car down the street and quietly made his way up to a two-story apartment building. His eyes began scanning the area looking for an easy target. A heat wave was moving through the area, so he had little trouble finding an apartment with an open window. The open window he chose belonged to 79-year-old Jennie Vincow.

Murder was the farthest thing from his mind at the moment. He was more interested in stealing the woman's valuables to support his growing drug addiction. With gloved hands, he quietly removed the screen from the window and crawled inside. According to Philip Carlo's 1996 book, The Night Stalker, Ramirez immediately made his way to the bedroom and began looking through the drawers, careful not to make a sound. Nothing. There was not one thing of value for him there. He became enraged at the elderly woman sleeping on the bed and decided to take his anger out on her. He quietly removed his hunting knife from its sheath and made his way toward her bed. He stood over her momentarily and contemplated his next move. Killing was something new to him and he did not want to make any mistakes. He held the knife up high and quickly brought it down on her chest. She immediately awoke and began screaming for her life, but he ignored her cries and continued to stab her again and again. After he tired of stabbing her, he placed his hand over her mouth and with one quick flick of the knife slit her throat. It was suddenly over just as quickly as it began. The elderly woman was dead and her killer stood over her panting. The act had excited him beyond his expectations and the thrill of the kill aroused him sexually. He quickly disrobed and performed necrophilia on the corpse.

August 20, 2003

Richard Speck

Speck's murders of eight young women -- all in nurse's training and rooming together in a quiet apartment house on Chicago's Southside -- stands as one of the most horrific and shocking crimes in U.S. history. During the mayhem of the killings, a ninth student nurse wedged herself under a bed and went undetected. Her description of the intruder with the "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo on his arm, led to Speck's capture. Her testimony at trial got him the death sentence. Murdering women was nothing new to Richard Speck. He had done it often before.

by David Lohr

On the Sunday morning of July 14, 1966, residents on South Chicago's East 100^th Street were suddenly awakened by a woman's screams. As local residents ran outside, they were shocked to notice a young woman standing on the second story ledge of a small townhouse unit. According to George Carpozi's 1967 book, The Chicago Nurse Murders, the young woman, Corazon Piezo Amurao, began shouting: "Help me! Help me! Everyone is dead … Oh God … he's killed them all!" she cried out.

Just then, one of the onlookers noticed a Chicago police car turning onto the street and quickly flagged the patrolman down. Officer Daniel R. Kelly of the South District Station noticed the girl balancing dangerously on the edge of the apartment building and immediately pulled off to the side of the street and jumped out of his patrol car. "You mustn't jump," he yelled. "Stay right there. I'll come inside and help you."

As Kelly made his way through the apartment he made a startling discovery. Just to the left of the front door was the body of a nude woman sprawled out on a couch. Kelly immediately ran over to check the young girl's vitals, but it was too late. Her body was cold to his touch -- she had been dead for several hours. Uncertain what he was getting into, Kelly drew his service revolver and made his way up a narrow flight of stairs. Once at the top of the stairway, he immediately noticed a pair of feet sticking out of a doorway into the hall. As he made his way towards the doorway, he made another startling discovery. A half-nude young woman was lying on her back; slash marks were visible on her neck and breasts. The girl was obviously dead and so Kelly continued to make his way down the hall. Then, just a few feet from the second woman's body, Kelly looked into a bedroom and discovered three more girls' bodies strew about the room. Their wrists were bound and all three appeared to have had their throats slashed.